Brrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!

We are having a little arctic winter chill, and it's not even officially winter yet. They were predicting very cold temps. and snow for the weekend, and for once the weathermen got it right. It started snowing yesterday morning we discovered as Hannah ran into our bedroom gleefully yelling, "It's snowing." She and Justin got all bundled up to go outside, although it didn't last too long because along with this snowstorm came extremely cold temperatures and wind that made if feel even colder. They were out for maybe 20 minutes and then came in for hot chocolate. Justin actually got bundled up a second time and went out to play for awhile, but then he was done. Owen was all excited too and wanted to go outside, but when I tried to get his snow pants on, he threw one of his 2 year old tantrums, which have become fairly common. I said he couldn't go out if he didn't put on his snow pants. His response was, "I have an idea. Play toys." and he quickly ran into the toy room, content to just stay inside and play with his animals, cars, trucks and trains.

Most of the snow is gone now--just a little frozen on the grass, but the bitter cold is still here and will remain all week long. Today the high temp. is 27 deg., and with windchill it feels like 12 deg. The low tonight will be in the teens--hope our pipes are strong. It's supposed to be similar tomorrow and then warm up slightly on Wed. when an even larger snowstorm is supposed to come through. Perhaps the kids will actually get to miss school then. They were very irritated this morning when I woke them up to tell them school was not cancelled or late. Vancouver was the only town in the whole greater Portland metro/SW Washington area that had school today. I was surprised. It usually doesn't take much for our district to cancel school. I guess it's less that they'll have to make up in the summer, and it's almost Christmas break anyway.

I am finally recovering from a bad cold that I had all last week. It started a week ago Saturday, and I finally felt somewhat better by last Friday, but am still getting over it. It hindered my Christmas preparations. I had hoped to be done with all my Christmas shopping by now, but I still have a little more to do, although not too bad. We just adopted a family through the Salvation Army along with my sisters and my mom, so we still need to get some stuff for them. We will be helping out a single mom and her 7 year old daughter who live with the grandmother. This is something I've wanted to do for years now but just never got around to it. I just want to help others because we are so blessed beyond what we need. Especially in these trying financial times, there are so many who are in need, and we want to help bring a little joy to this family for Christmas.

I will leave you with pictures of the kids out in the snow and some pics of Zoolights at the Oregon Zoo. Thankfully, we went last week (although traffic and parking were a nightmare) because it would be way too cold to go now. The lights were great as usual, but the highlight was seeing the new baby elephant. He was born a few months ago, but we hadn't made it over to see him yet. He is very cute.

Cousins in front of some lights--Owen would not pose with them

Owen especially liked seeing the baby elephant

Catch-up

Once again, I'm playing catch-up on the blog. The past couple days I have had a huge pain in the neck--literally. I was fine Sunday morning and then as soon as I walked into Justin's Sunday school class where I was going to help out, my neck and shoulder seized up. The idea of working with 20-30 5/6 year olds must've been more than my neck/shoulder could handle. It was killing me for 2 days, and sitting at a computer for any length was almost unbearable. I'm feeling better today, although now am sitting with ice and heat packs.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends. We had dinner at our house. My mom and my brother and sisters and all the sister/brother in-laws and cousins came over. We've grown into quite the family, and it's always a full house when we're all together. We also had tons of food as usual and didn't even begin to eat a majority of it. Our staples are of course, turkey (I roasted one and my mom did a smoked turkey breast), stuffing, mashed potatoes, Sara's sweet potato praline casserole, green bean casserole, Marcie's fruit salad, rolls and you can't forget the jellied cranberry sauce out of a can. Then of course after stuffing yourself on that, there's dessert. No one was actually very hungry for dessert, although Hannah did eat two pieces of Grandma's upside down pumpkin pie. It was a great day with the family, and even though it's always kinda crazy during the day, and I don't take a lot of time to really stop and think about what I'm thankful for then, as I reflect on it after all the craziness, I realize how totally blessed we are. I am so grateful to the Lord for everything that he has provided us even beyond what we need.

Gathered around the food to pray

All of us together

The kids made little oreo turkeys, which they promptly ate.

After cleaning up from Thanksgiving, it was time for the next holiday adventure and getting a Christmas tree. After missing a year or two with our friends, the Goves, we reinstated the annual Christmas tree hunt with them. We went to a tree farm to find the "perfect" tree. It turned out to be a great day. It was foggy, but that provided a cool backdrop to the hillside full of trees. Thankfully, it wasn't raining like it was horribly last year when we found our tree and cut it down in record time. We found a tree really close to the car, which Dale was thankful for, because I usually like to wander all over the hillside to find a tree that he has to carry quite a ways to the car. Dale got the tree set up that night, and then the onslaught of nonstop begging to decorate the tree by Hannah and Justin began. We did decorate the tree Monday night and did more decorating last night. Right now, the house looks like a Christmas store exploded in it. I love having the decorations up, but I really dislike the process of putting them up. I will be glad when it's up and the half dozen rubbermaid tubs that store the decorations are put back out in the garage. Here are some pics from getting our tree. I will have to post pics of the decorated tree later.

Hope you all are getting in the Christmas spirit and enjoying this last month of 2008.

This is Owen's new smile

Hannah and Gabby inspecting a little tree

Justin and Owen heading off to find a tree

All the young Lough/Gove kids with the exception of Owen

The Lough family and our tree

I've been tagged and given a blog award

Okay, I have some catching up to do. I have two friends and fellow design team members at Scrapdango who have blog tagged me and given me the Kreativ Blogger award.

First off, a couple weeks ago, Tara tagged me. Now what this means is that I'm supposed to

1. Share SEVEN facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird...just 7 facts. :) and

2. Tag 7 people at the end of your post and make sure to let them know they've been tagged! Make sure to provide a link to the person who tagged you.

The reason I did not follow through right away is that 1. I could not think of seven facts about me that I thought were very interesting and 2. I could not think of 7 people to tag. But I'm going to do this.

So first, seven random facts about me:

1. I modeled for a cheerleading catalog while in high school. I missed school for 3 days and then could not cheer at the game that week despite representing my school as a cheerleader in the catalog. Go figure.
2. I love to eat chocolate cake with milk poured over it.
3. I cannot stand anything having to do with eyes aside from putting my contacts in.
4. My favorite stores are Gap Outlet, Trader Joe's and The Container Store
5. Speaking of the Container Store, I love organizational stuff but my house does not look organized in the least.
6. My favorite color is brown. Must remind me of chocolate. :)
7. My favorite class in Jr. High was wood shop

Okay, so there's 7 facts about me. Now to tag 7 people. Here they are. Be sure and check out their blogs

Annaliese
Lucy
Kathi
Colleen
Carrie
Julie
Gina

Now for the Kreativ Blogger award, I'm not sure my blog is really all that kreativ (or creative), but I'll post it anyway. My friend Colleen nominated me.

So what does this mean? Well, I get to display this beautiful award--Oscar and Emmy, move ovah. Then I get to nominate 5 other people to receive this prestigious award. Since 2 of the seven people I listed above already have the award (Colleen and Kathi), I will nominate the other 5 people, so grab you award gals and nominate 5 other people.

Scrapdango Nov. kit mid-month reveal

A few days ago, the DT over at Scrapdango revealed their designs for the wonderful Nov. kits. Due to manufacturer delays, we didn't really get our kits in time to reveal our designs on the first, so we did a mid-month reveal. The kits were so awesome this month. We all agreed that they were some of the best we've had yet. I am on the spice kit team, but I also bought one of the sugar kits because I just had to have it too. Here's the spice kit and the designs that I made with it. I still have so much of the kit left to work with and really need to use it up.

My Birthday Weekend

So my birthday was last Friday and I would've blogged about this sooner but really wanted to finish my Week in the Life posts before doing anything else. It was a good birthday this year. Dale went in to work a little late so that he could get the kids ready for school and take them and let me sleep in a little. I had already been up early to teach cycling but went back to bed when I got home. The rest of the day ended up being a little hectic because I tried to take the boys to run some errands after picking Justin up from school. I have determine that I CANNOT take Owen to a store. Anyway...after Hannah got home, my friend Annaliese and her kids came over for a somewhat weekly playdate we have on Friday. She gave me a gift of some clear stamps, which I love and a beautiful card. Unfortunately, they couldn't stay long that day because Dale had arranged for my mom to take the kids for the night (even Owen) and he had to leave to get them over there and be back for us to leave at 5:00 for the evening out that he had planned. I did not know where we were going. We met our friends, Denton and Heather Davison, and went to dinner at a small restaurant in Portland called Lovely Hula Hands. You would think from the name that they serve Hawaiian food or something but it doesn't do that at all. It is just a small little place that changes it's menu daily based on fresh local ingredients. I guess you would classify it as Northwest cuisine. It was good. The next part of the night was more of a surprise, although Hannah had kinda let the cat out of the bag before she left by saying something about a play. It had actually been Heather's idea because one of her hair clients (she is our hairstylist too) highly recommended the musical

by Portland Center Stage--a small local theater. This is not something Dale would choose to do in a million years--not really his thing. He doesn't mind theater sometimes, but musical theater scares him. It was very good, and I think he might even have enjoyed it a little. Now when I say it is local theater, I'm not sure if that is even an accurate description. We would have to ask my theater friend, Annaliese, who I wish could've been with us. The theater is smack dab in the middle of the Portland Pearl District, but I don't think that most of the actors are local. They were all professional caliber actors/singers/dancers and after reading the program more on Sunday realized that most of them have acted all around the US and some in the UK and on tv and in movies. It was a high quality cast and production. It was a nice surprise for my birthday and even nicer to come home and just be able to relax and not have to worry about putting kids to bed.

Of course, I slept in on Saturday. The kids had a great time at Grandma Judi's and she brought them home around noon just in time to go to Hannah's very wet soccer game, although we actually lucked out because it pretty much stopped raining for most of the game. Only 2 games left after this, and I will be happy when it's over. It's been fun but the season gets long, especially when it gets so wet and cold.

My birthday continued on Sunday when Dale planned to have the family over for pizza and cake or something. I actually ended up making most of the calls and decided that rather than cake (especially since no one had bought one or made one) that I wanted sundaes. I really wanted a hot fudge sundae, so we had a little sundae bar. It was fun and good to be able to celebrate with family, which was the only downfall of having our own little night out.

Today we had another lazy day with no school for Veteran's Day. Happy Veteran's Day to you all and especially those who are veterans have served this country with bravery and honor. We called my brother-in-law, Jeramy, to wish him a Happy Veteran's Day since he is the only person we really know who actually is a veteran. He was in the Navy when the current Gulf war broke out. I truly thank all the men and women that risk their lives everyday and sacrifice so much to defend this country.

TTFN--Ta Ta For Now

Let's Wrap This Up

Okay, so if you've been following along in my Week in the Life, you can see I am way late now. I ended up getting a cold that really wasn't too bad but I just didn't feeling like sitting and typing, especially as much as I have been in these posts. But I want to finish this up, so I am going to do it as quickly as possible and just post some major points for the remaining days and slideshows for each. Here goes.

Friday 10-24

• It was a very foggy, cold morning, so I drove the kids to school.
• Lunch for the boys was mac n' cheese (the blue box), a staple
• Justin and Owen watch Tom 'n' Jerry. Owen was cracking up.
• Hannah and Justin have been hard at work on their Christmas lists. Justin worked on his complete with handdrawn pictures to go along with each item.
• Hannah came home in a crazy mood and was doing armpit f_ _ _ts (just can't type the word). I think the boy next door is teaching her some not very ladylike things.
• Dale came home fairly early at about 4:45 PM and took some time to relax and read the paper--one of his daily rituals.
• Dale got a groggy Owen up from his nap.
• I actually had an Uppercase Living party to do, which is the first I've had in many months.

While I was gone, Dale had Hannah and Justin draw pictures for Elcie, a girl from Haiti that we sponsor through Compassion International.

Saturday 10-25

• This morning, we had soccer games for Hannah and Justin. Justin's was first and Dale coached by himself since Coach Denton was out of town. Justin had his 2nd and last goal of the season. He has become quite the good little soccer player. I really look forward to watching him improve.
• Hannah's game was next. I don't remember the final score of the game, but her team has had a rough season being all girls in a coed league and a lot younger and smaller than a lot the players on the other teams. I think we scored a couple goals, but the other team usually scores quite a few. Hannah continues to have fun though, and it was a perfect day for playing soccer.
• Owen did great at the games and pretty much stayed right at the sidelines being cute as ever. He did manage to take Mommy's chocolate luna bar, which was my breakfast. I can't believe that Owen might be out there playing soccer as early as next fall.
• The rest of the day was spent getting ready for and having our Halloween party, which I already posted pics of, so I didn't do anymore here.
• One final shot I got that evening was before Owen had his pj's on, and he was playing with Daddy's boots.

Sunday 10-26

• We went to the 9:00 am service at Crossroads Community Church. If it weren't for Dale, we wouldn't make it because I have to admit that I barely get up in time to get myself ready and am no help with the kids. I love my husband.
• After we made our usual stop at Starbucks where I get my Grande 1%, 3 pump Pumpkin Spice latte and Dale gets either some version of mocha or caramel machiato. The kids also usually get some type of cream frappucino. So far, we haven't started getting anything for Owen, but I'm sure we won't be able to get away with that much longer.
• On the way home, Dale called the Indiana Loughs so Hannah and Justin could talk to Grandma Sharon. These conversations usually last awhile, especially with Hannah. The kids love the talks with Grandma and sometimes Grandpa.
• We had a very leisurely day. Dale read the paper with his coffee. I love to look at the Sunday ads but don't get much further than that usually. We had lunch and just relaxed.
• It was another BEAUTIFUL fall day although it was quite windy.
• The kids spent quite a bit of time outside playing with the neighbors.
• Dale and I joined them and he took Owen on a bike ride, which Owen loves.
• I took some photos of neighboring trees with beautiful fall colors. Our trees are more spectacular in the spring than the fall. I also took a photo of our front door, which I decorated for our Halloween party. This is the first time I've decorated for Halloween at all outside.
• With it being so windy, the kids asked if they could fly the rocket kite that Grandpa Robert had bought them awhile back. They got it going pretty good.
• After a nice relaxing day, Dale snuggled up on the couch with the kids in their pj's to watch a movie before bed.
• After the kids were down, I spent some time on the computer as I usually do after their bedtime.

Whew, that's it!!! I got through the whole week. Sorry this took me long, and I should've done it all using the bulleted format, which is much more concise and easier for you to read.

Now I just need to compile all this and put my Week in the Life album together. I've also got another little project going on this month where I'm taking one photo a day of something that I'm thankful for. I'll do a layout with all the photos at the end--not quite as involved as a whole album, although I do need to remember to take a photo each day. I'll post some of those photos now and then. Thanks for reading about a somewhat typical week in the Lough household.

Thursday 10-23

Well back to my Week in the Life posts. Only 4 days to go.

Thursdays are one of my favorite days of the week. After having my busiest day on Wed., I don't have anything that I really have to do on Thursdays except get the kids to school.

Many days, Hannah is already up before I am, but today, I had to wake her up. I did my usual get the kids going and walked them up to school. Then I got home and got Owen up and got him a waffle with jam, which has been his latest morning staple. While hanging out with Owen in the family room, I noticed an interesting impression in the carpet, which I quickly realized was an impression of Dale's hands from doing pushups there the night before. He has been doing some little project that a coworker at B&C has a bunch of guys doing where they do so many pushups each day.

I got Owen dressed and we went to Fred Meyer to pick up stuff to put in the BOO bags. I went ahead and grabbed candy for Halloween. We picked up Justin and headed home. I got them lunch and then they managed to get ahold of big tootsie pop suckers. Owen's new thing is to push the dining chairs all over the kitchen to get what he wants, so he managed to get up into the candy jar. After getting a sugar high, Owen got ahold of the toy Home Depot drill and did laps up and down the "Alley" from the family room, through the kitchen and into the toy room. This is a common activity for Owen and Justin. They like you to see how fast they can run. After getting Owen down for a nap, which is unfortunately becoming a more difficult task lately, Justin wanted to play Mousetrap. We've never actually played the game--just put it all together and watch the ball go through the obstacle course and set off the trap.

Today is (was) my best friend, Annaliese's, birthday, so I made her a gift. I started with a blank white canvas and painted it a buttery yellow and then added brown and burnt orange to simulate fall colors and put on a Uppercase Living expression that said Happy Harvest. Dale and I actually went to see Annaliese in the play Arsenic and Old Lace. She is part of the Magenta Theater group and was in her second week of playing the part of Elaine in the show. Dale had been working in Vancouver for the day and made it home relatively early. I made a quick dinner of Trader Joe's (I love that store) gnocchi in tomato sauce and then Hannah, Justin and I quickly took our BOO bags and dropped one off at the next door neighbor's and then ran down to Ashley and Lindsey's house to drop one off there. The kids had a great time ringing the bell and running away as fast as they could. Then Aunt Katie came to babysit the kids, and Dale and I actually got a night out. The play was very good--extremely funny, although Annaliese told us that we were the quietest audience they had had. They were used to many more laughs. It was very funny, but I am just not a real vocal public laugher (is that a word?) and apparently neither was the rest of the audience. We really did enjoy the performance my friend.

After we got home, I actually had Dale take some model pose pictures of me that I needed to use as an avatar for an online scrapbooking contest I was doing on www.allyscraps.com. It was an America's Next Top Model themed contest. Since I was actually dressed in something other than sweats and had makeup on, I thought this would be a good time to do it. Photos of me are not really my favorite thing, but some of them turned out okay.

Here is the slideshow for the day: